Mailund on the Internet

Wednesday this week I’m giving a talk at the Danish Society for Computer Science. I was asked to give the keynote talk at this years general assembly before they hand out this year’s Best Thesis Award.

I’m tired of talking about my main project — association mapping — so I decided to give a talk on our CoalHMM work (although I am only working on that a small percentage of my time).

The slides file is too big to upload to slideshare, but if my flash hack works you should see them below:

You can also get it as a PDF file, a PowerPoint file or a Keynote file, if you want.

The last couple of presentations I’ve made I have been using the Keynote program on my Mac. I’m really happy with the program. It makes it very easy to put together pretty presentations (if I say so myself) with very little work. Especially its handling of graphics impresses me. Compared to using OpenOffice, as I usually did before getting the Mac, there’s essentially no work involved in including graphics. Automatic masking and alpha channels beats modifying images in Gimp any day!

I couldn’t really figure out how to put presentations on my homepage, though. Keynote files are really directories, so you cannot just copy them to the homepage directory. I found out, though, that if a Mac downloads a zip’ed Keynote file it will just open it in Keynote, so I guess that is the way to do that.

Reading through a page at Nature about metagenomics (probably requires subscription…) I saw this sentence:

“The biggest metagenomic project on Earth might be our Neanderthal genome project,” says Egholm. They are using 454 to sequence the complete genome of a Neanderthal, which Egholm says they hope to release by the end of the year. But 95–98% of the DNA in the Neanderthal sample comes from the environment rather than from a Neanderthal. This means that to get the 1 coverage, or roughly 3 billion base pairs, of the genome, the team must sequence somewhere between 70 billion to 100 billion base pairs of these environmental samples.

Sequencing the Neanderthal must be quite some challenge! Of course, contamination by bacteria should be fairly easy to discover and get rid of compared to contamination by the humans doing the sequences. We are just too closely related to the Neanderthal for that to be a simple task.

Of course, the Neanderthal specimens are handled carefully, but some contamination is unavoidable.  How much of a problem it is, I do not know, though.  I tried googling for it, but didn’t really find any consistent answers.

I look forward to getting my hands on the Neanderthal sequence, though.  I would love running it through our CoalHMM analysis!

With the music festival season coming up, I just have to share today’s Wulffmorgenthaler:

In case you are not familiar with this comic strip, I suggest you go read a few strips. Crazy humour at its best!

It’s a pair of Danish  comedians, Mikael Wulf and Anders Morgenthaler. Well, Mikael Wulf is a comedian, I guess Anders Morgenthaler is more all-round artist.  They had a few shows on Danish television.  The first was great, but after that the quality dropped.

Their comic strips are still very funny, though.